About Me

Buford C. Terrell
Controlled substances laws and their consequences have been the center of my professional life for over fifteen years. I host a public interest television program in Houston, “Drugs, Crime, and Politics” , produced by the Drug Policy forum of Texas, and have done so for most of its ten-year history. Before my retirement, I taught a seminar, “Controlled Substances Law” for many years at South Texas College of Law.
In this blog I intend to explore the features and consequences of those laws, especially the unintended consequences, and look at the need for, and possibility of, changing them. Don’t expect a lot of breaking news or current events, although there will be some. My approach will be more historical and theoretical. I hope to get a lot of criticism – good, bad, and otherwise – and to start some good, heated discussions.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

One Life to Save

One
Life to Save

President
Obama, in his January 16 speech on gun control, quoted an old truism: “If
there’s one life that can be saved, we have an obligation to try.”This statement, like most folk wisdom,
contains a kernel of truth, but is on the whole misleading. The major problem
is that it ignores that even saving a life incurs some cost, and that cost may
be measured in lives itself.

For
instance, requiring pleasure boats to carry life preservers does save lives,
but it costs lives as well.Life
preservers have to be manufactured, and manufacturing processes entail
industrial accidents, some of them deadly.The manufactured preservers have to be trucked from factory to boaters;
every additional truck on the highways adds fractionally to the total of
automobile deaths.In the example the
number of lives saved far exceeds the number of lives lost, thus the
requirement of life preservers is justified.But the calculus is often not that simple.As the life preserver example suggests,
determining the actual cost can become complex, indirect and confusing.

It
can also be psychologically confusing.One favorite experiment used, with many variations, by game theoreticians
and social economists involves the following scenario.The subject is told that he controls a
railroad switch and a runaway train is speeding toward it.If he does nothing, the train will run over
and kill a group of five workers trapped on the track, but if he throws the
switch, the train will be diverted onto the alternate track and run over only
one person trapped there.This dilemma
should be a simple one for homo
oeconomicus, the rational man so beloved by classical economists.The sacrifice of one life to save five seems
the only rational thing to do.But real
people have major problems reaching this conclusion.They make a strong moral distinction between
doing nothing, even if five people die, as opposed to some positive action that
will intentionally kill one person, even if five are saved as a result.(Dan Ariely, one of the pioneering
experimental economists has several books explaining social economy to the
general reader and both Freakonomics
volumes contain information on these issues as well.)

A
cost benefit analysis of the War on Drugs is complicated by all three of these
problems.Much of the pro-Prohibition
argument hinges on the theme of saving lives at any cost.The actual costs of Prohibition are hidden by
long, complex, and indirect causal chains.Psychological and subjective feelings greatly affect the weight of the
prices assigned to actions taken to ban drugs and drug use.

The
absolutism of “save one life at any price” shows up in the drug law debates in
many guises.The most common is the
objection that a proposed reform will “send the wrong message to the children.”Is it really true that telling a kid his
grandmother uses marijuana to help treat her cancer will lead him to become a
drug addict?Does it matter that needle
exchanges lead to precipitous drops in the rate of blood-borne infections and
protect the families of drug users if they hypothetically encourage one user to
continue his bad habit?

Tangled
causation is also problematic in analyzing drug law problems.What causes opioid overdose deaths?In the pre-Harrison Act era, when most opiate
users were middle class and with stable home lives, overdose deaths were so
rare as to be unnoticed.When
Switzerland began distributing free medicinal grade heroin to addicts, their
overdose death rate dropped to … zero.On the other hand, in drug Prohibition America, overdose deaths are
frequent; frequent that is until one looks closely.The primary fact is that most street addicts –
that stereotype most people have of drug users – don’t die drug-related
deaths.They die deaths of poverty and
homelessness: starvation and malnutrition, exposure and hypothermia,
infections, and muggings.Even the
drug-related deaths are usually casualties of the Drug War and not consequences
of drug use.They are deaths from drug
adulteration (even strychnine has been used to cut heroin), drug substitution
(fentanyl for heroin, heroin for cocaine), improper injection methods
(embolisms, injected particles, infections), reduced tolerance after detox, or
lack of medical assistance when friends fearing arrest refusal to take an
overdosing companion to the emergency room (after all, overdose itself is rarely
fatal, and it operates so slowly that time to get medical assistance is
available).

The
Drug War also adjusts the social and psychological costs to make the drug laws
appear effective.A century ago,
middle-class housewives with opiate habits were perceived and treated
sympathetically, but within a decade of passage of the Harrison Tax Act addicts
were objects of scorn and fear.Drug
Prohibition grew from evil Chinese luring innocent white girls into their opium
dens, to cocaine-fueled Blacks on rampages of rape, to violent Mexicans stoked
on their loco-weed.Later, marijuana
smokers ranged from unwashed, Un-American dropouts and war protesters to
coach-locked stoners.In short, drug
users became something outside toe pale of civilization, something
non-human.Their lives and well-being
dropped out of the cost analysis entirely.

A
proper study of the utility of the drug laws means that these complications
must be accounted for.The costs of action
must be balanced against the usually overlooked or miscalculated costs of
action.Drug reformers must insist on a
balanced and fact-based argument.